THE HOT CORNER
Baseball coverage from the inside — Sacramento Prayers and the FBL
By Claude Playball | Baseball Insider & Analyst | Host, "Hot Corner" Podcast
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November 1997 | Awards Season | Four Starters, Four Cy Young Spots
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TOP FOUR AL CY YOUNG FINISHERS ALL WEAR SACRAMENTO UNIFORMS, ESPENOZA FILES FOR FREE AGENCY
The 1997 AL Cy Young Award ballots were returned and tabulated, and when the results were published, the top four finishers — first, second, third, and fourth in voting — all played for the same team. Brian Strickler, Mario Espenoza, Jordan Rubalcava, Bernardo Andretti. First, second, third, fourth. I have been covering baseball for a long time and has never seen a rotation place four pitchers in the top four of Cy Young voting. It may never happen again. The four of them together went sixty-seven and thirty across one hundred and sixty-two games of the regular season and then won a World Series.
Espenoza, who finished second in Cy Young voting with a hundred and ten total points, rejected Sacramento's qualifying offer on November 21st and became a free agent two days later. He is now available to the rest of baseball. Espenoza was the second-best pitcher in the American League in 1997 and he is no longer a Sacramento Prayer.
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THE AWARD LEDGER — SACRAMENTO'S 1997 HONORS
Cy Young: Strickler, unanimous
Twenty-eight first-place votes. Two hundred and thirty-eight innings. Two hundred and twenty-five strikeouts. An 18-7 record and a 2.31 ERA. The Hot Corner spent six months documenting this season and nothing requires addition now. Unanimous is the correct verdict.
Gold Gloves: Rubalcava (P), Perez (1B), Lozano (3B)
Three Gold Gloves from a championship team. Rubalcava's fielding award is the organizational footnote to his Cy Young third-place finish — the pitcher who also picks it. Perez has been among the most undervalued defensive first basemen in the league for three years. Lozano's Gold Glove is the one that carries the most surprise value: sixteen errors on the season, a defensive profile I questioned multiple times in print, and yet the voters gave him the award. To put it bluntly, I am not going to pretend that I fully understand it.
Silver Slugger: Choi (RF)
Forty-six home runs. A hundred and twenty-seven RBI. A .278 average with a .564 slugging percentage. The award is correctly given. Choi is twenty-three years old. These are the numbers he is posting in year two. There is nothing else here to say, his stats speak for themselves.
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THE TRANSACTION LOG AND WHAT IT MEANS
The front office signed the following players to extensions in November: Rodriguez, Berrios, Gonzalez, Esparza, Medina, Blake, Zuniga, Mollohan, Chavarria, Benson, Lawson. Several of these signings require specific comment.
Medina at a hundred and eight thousand dollars for one year is the most significant signing on the list. He tore his rotator cuff on August 12th and the recovery timeline from that surgery is eight to twelve months. If Medina returns to form, the closer problem that plagued the postseason disappears. If he does not, Benson — who re-signed for ninety-two thousand — will open 1998 as the nominal closer while the front office figures out the situation. I plan on watching the Medina recovery with more interest than any other single development this offseason.
Esparza at two hundred and twenty-two thousand is correct. He was the bullpen's most consistent arm from August through October and he will be needed more in 1998 without Espenoza stabilizing the rotation.
Matt Adams was traded to Baltimore along with minor leaguer Sam Taft in exchange for twenty-five-year-old catcher Jordan Chavira. Adams never recovered his health after the groin injury. The organization moved on at a reasonable cost and added catching depth behind Florez. Chavira was immediately signed to a fifty-thousand-dollar extension.
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RAFAEL BALDELOMAR WON A GOLD GLOVE
Rafael Baldelomar, who won the 1996 ALCS MVP Award as a Sacramento Prayer and was lost to the expansion draft the day after signing a contract extension, won the 1997 National League Gold Glove Award as center fielder for the Cleveland Cardinals.
The Hot Corner has discussed the Baldelomar expansion draft story several times across the past two seasons. The organizational wound is real and documented. His Gold Glove does not reopen it so much as remind the league — and the fans — that the player Sacramento lost was genuinely excellent, not merely a sentimental loss. He won the award. He earned it. The Hot Corner congratulates him sincerely and files it for the record.
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THE LEAGUE PICTURE
Daniel Mele of Baltimore won the AL MVP in a landslide — twenty-seven of twenty-eight first-place votes, a Triple Crown at .356, fifty home runs, a hundred and forty-eight RBI. He was the best position player in the American League and the voting reflects it accurately. Strickler received the lone dissenting MVP vote, which is itself a tribute to what the rotation produced in 1997. Bobby Felts won the NL MVP unanimously with fifty-three home runs.
Chris Bruce of Columbus won the AL Mariano Rivera Award with forty-six saves and a 1.73 ERA — an extraordinary closer season from a team that was eliminated in the wild card round. Columbus is the team to watch in the AL Central in 1998. They lost in the wild card game in 1997, but Bruce, Hernandez, and the core of that roster returns. The Hot Corner marks it.
Colt Washburn of Washington won the AL Rookie of the Year unanimously. Twenty-three home runs, ninety-seven RBI from a twenty-two-year-old third baseman on a sixty-seven-win team. He is a name to know.
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THE INBOX
From Imani Foster of Sacramento's Midtown neighborhood, a jazz pianist, who asks: "Four Prayers in the top four of Cy Young voting. What's the right way to appreciate that?"
The way you appreciate an extraordinary chord voicing: by recognizing it won't resolve the same way twice and that the moment it happened deserves to be heard clearly before it passes. One and two and three and four. All Sacramento. One of them is already gone.
From Stefan Kowalczyk of Davis, a wine country tour guide, who asks: "What does losing Espenoza actually cost this team in 1998?"
Approximately a hundred and twenty innings of sub-3.00 ERA pitching, a left-hander that opposing lineups spent six months trying to solve, and the second-best postseason arm on the roster across October. What it does not cost is the rotation's identity — Strickler, Rubalcava, Andretti — which remains the AL's best trio. What replaces Espenoza determines whether 1998 is a championship run or a slide back toward the field.
From Lena Bergqvist of Sacramento's East Sacramento neighborhood, an urban gardener, who asks: "If Medina comes back healthy, does this team repeat?"
If Medina returns to his August 11th form — the form that produced a 2.44 ERA and twenty-six saves before his arm gave out — yes. Full stop. A healthy Medina, Strickler, Rubalcava, Andretti, and whatever starter replaces Espenoza, with Cruz, Choi, Perez, and Lopez in the lineup, is a World Series-caliber roster. The entire architecture of 1998 rests on a shoulder that underwent rotator cuff surgery in August. Gardeners know: you tend the most vulnerable thing first.
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The 1997 Sacramento Prayers: sixteen championships, one unanimous Cy Young, three Gold Gloves, one Silver Slugger, a World Series MVP for Andretti, a departing Espenoza, and a returning Medina whose arm holds the answer to 1998.
The Hot Corner will be here for all of it.
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Claude Playball is a baseball insider and analyst and host of the Hot Corner podcast, based in Sacramento, California.